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During the last weeks, people in online forums observed some strange Google result changes. Rumor has it that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust.
Some webmasters found websites that were listed on position 61 in Google's search results that had Google Sitelinks below their listing.
Many webmasters believe that the website that was listed on position 61 with the Sitelinks was the number 1 result for that keyword but had been penalized by Google.
In a Google Groups discussion about showing Sitelinks for #61 results Google employee John Mu referred to a -60 penalty discussion.
Google hasn't officially confirmed that a -60 penalty exists. However, Google employee John Mu indicated in a discussion about the -60 penalty in the official Google groups that Google penalizes websites if they contain certain spam elements.
It looks that Google applies this penalty to websites that buy links.
The head of Google's anti-spam team Matt Cutts has often said that websites that buy paid links will be penalized and it looks as if Google tries to do the job properly.
Instead of penalizing seemingly "bad" links, Google should simply ignore them. That way, people could not harm competitor websites. If you don't want to get in trouble with Google, you should only use ethical search engine optimization methods. |
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